


can't reverse what will begin

by sidonay



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Private Investigator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 02:58:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11842545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: Mindy picks up her hand, goes for the glass to take a sip but then changes her mind, curls her fingers around the edge of the table as if she’s preparing to push her seat back and make a run for it but she doesn’t do much more than that. Sheshouldbe making more of a big deal out of this because this isn’t a bar, this isn’t the place where a guy could justapproachher and start a conversation, feed her a ridiculous story like the one he’s just told but this is also the most interesting thing to have happened to her so far this week.





	can't reverse what will begin

**Author's Note:**

> I recently started rewatching episodes from seasons 2 and 3 (after having not seen the show for quite awhile) and found myself getting unexpectedly attached to Mindy and Peter as a ship this time around. I really wanted to write something but AUs are the only thing I'm good at and finding one for these two that could still maintain some actual _humor_ wasn't easy. But then! This.
> 
> So. You know. Here you go.

“Okay,” the man says, pulling out the empty seat across from Mindy at the small table she had requested in the back because, while she didn’t mind eating alone, she wasn’t the type of person who drew any sort of noticeable pleasure in doing it regularly but she was _trying_ today because her regular place was surprisingly busy, she didn't feel like drumming her fingers, impatient for delivery, and she wasn't in the mood to shove money into the waiting mouth of the break room vending machine. She was trying and her reward for doing so seemed to be a bright-eyed stranger thinking it was perfectly fine to just invite himself into her personal space. “Here’s the deal.” He presses his palms flat on the table's surface, leans forward slightly and Mindy puts down her fork, the noise of it clattering against her plate seeming unbelievably thunderous even though there were enough voices in here, conversing, laughing and chewing with their mouths open to cover up the sound. “I’m following someone and I really cannot have them notice me because, if they do, I’d have to tell the person who _hired_ me to follow them that I failed and then I don’t get paid.”

Mindy blinks at him and he’s just staring at her, glances briefly over her shoulder and she turns even though showing her back to this guy was probably the _worst_ idea so, as she looks, she reaches over, covers the top of her glass with her hand. When she turns back, not seeing whatever—or _whoever_ —he was looking for (not that she would have known even if she _was_ staring literally right at them), he smiles at her, nods to her hand still covering her drink as if silently asking: _what’s the all about_.

“Like I’m going to give you the chance to slip something in there,” Mindy says, picks up her hand, goes for the glass to take a sip but then changes her mind, curls her fingers around the edge of the table as if she’s preparing to push her seat back and make a run for it but she doesn’t do much more than that. She _should_ be making more of a big deal out of this because this isn’t a bar, this isn’t the place where a guy could just _approach_ her and start a conversation, feed her a ridiculous story like the one he’s just told but this is also the most interesting thing to have happened to her so far this week. “Listen: if you’re a stalker, you can just tell me.” She won't say  _it's okay_ because it wouldn't be, not really, but it would be better than whatever he was trying to sell her. Besides, she'd never admit it, but she'd been there before, although she wouldn't go so far as to call it  _stalking_. Just a misunderstanding.

In response, he reaches into the front pocket of his jacket, pulls out a business card, holds it between his index and middle finger out towards her and she takes it from him, flips it over, studies the sharp lines of the black print. There’s no flourish to it, no pictures, no fancy fonts. Just **Peter Prentice, Private Investigator**. An address. A phone number. As she’s reading, looking at it as if she’s expecting to find some hidden message, her waiter shows up, starts to clear away her empty plate, seems to hesitate at her sudden unexpected company and then recovers, asks if they’d like anything else.

“I’d love a piece of your cheesecake,” the man— _Peter_ , Mindy corrects herself—says and she looks up from his business card, drops her hands, doesn’t bother trying to mask her indignation, mouth opening slightly, astounded at what she just heard.

“This is _my_ table,” she says. “I’m not paying for that.” And then, to the waiter: “Chocolate cake. Please.” The waiter has a look on his face as if he wants to say:  _whatever’s going on here, I don’t want to know_ and then wanders away towards the kitchen. She puts Peter's card on the tablecloth, wedges it under the salt shaker. “Is this a scam? Because I’m not falling for another one. I told you I’m not paying for your cheese—” Peter touches the side of her hand, just lightly with the tips of his fingers which she most certainly did not say he could do and then points as subtly as anybody could really manage when they're trying to point directly at a particular person.

Mindy follows his finger, sees a young woman sitting with a much older man at the table by the window as if she doesn’t have a care in the world about being seen. She throws her head back, laughs at something the man has said, stirs her spoon in her coffee so perfectly that it doesn’t seem natural, as if she’s performing for him.

“What’d she do?” Mindy asks quietly as she turns back towards Peter, realizes that he’s still touching her and pulls her hand away from him.

“What she’s _doing_ ,” Peter says, “Is cheating on her husband.”

“With _that_ guy?” asks Mindy. She has no idea what the woman’s husband looks like, but he must make his money demanding the answers to riddles from people trying to cross a bridge if what she was currently sitting with was the better option out of the two. True, there was no accounting for taste, but still. “Are you sure he hasn’t kidnapped her?” Peter laughs.

“Pretty sure,” he says.

“It could be a long lost father sort of situation,” Mindy says, isn’t sure why she’s so focused on spinning this into something more fanciful than a cheater doing what cheaters do.

“I hope not,” Peter says, brings out a stack of folded photographs from another pocket, puts them down on the table and Mindy can’t help herself, looks at them, one by one, but stops halfway through because they may have started as just a kiss on the cheek but the rest were taken through the curtain of a motel room and she didn't really need to see how much worse they could potentially get. “Check out the last one,” Peter tells her when he can see that she’s not going to do it on her own. She does, actually, start to trawl through the rest, moving through them like a flip-book but then:

“No. You know what? No.” She gives them back to him, puts her hands up briefly.

“You’re really missing out,” Peter says, puts the photos back where he’d pulled them out from, shrugs slightly, folds his hands together and Mindy bounces her leg under the table, peers around the room, biting on the inside of her cheek. She doesn’t want to know, she doesn’t want to know, this is weird, she should have told him to leave over ten minutes ago.

“Fine,” she says, “Okay,” holds out her hand, wiggles her fingers. She can’t help herself, it’s just how she was built and Peter grins, rummages around in his jacket and finally manages to bring it out, gives it to her and, of course, that’s the exact moment that the waiter that has gone from being _her_ waiter to _their_ waiter decides to show up with their dessert.

“Ah,” the waiter grunts. Nothing else, just that and Mindy makes a soft noise of surprise, pushes the picture up to her chest to hide it but they all know he’s already seen it. There’s no way to tell how closely he truly had looked, if he made the connection, if he recognized the figures as the same ones sitting on the other side of the room but he looked fairly disgruntled either way.

“Do you mind?” Mindy asks, stares pointedly up at him. “We’re trying to work.” He looks nervous so maybe he _did_ know or, perhaps, he just thinks they’re perverts. She picks up Peter’s card, still on the table, shows it to the waiter and he looks back and forth from it to them. “I’m new,” Mindy says. “He hasn’t put my name on the card yet. You’ll really blow this for us if you say anything so… Don’t. Please. Thank you. Bye.”

“O—Okay,” the waiter stammers, gives the card back and scurries off, either to leave them alone as they requested—a story clutched in his hands to tell his friends after work—or he’s going to find his manager and they only have a couple minutes to finish before they’re both shoved out the door and politely told to not come back. Peter had been eating his cheesecake while Mindy had been speaking and he smiles at her again when she shifts in her seat, stuffs the photograph in her purse, forgetting where it came from and he doesn’t say anything about it.

“What?” She asks when she notices he’s still making that face at her, still watching her, and she slides her fork through her own slice of chocolate cake, loading it because if they were going to be out of here in the next few seconds, she was going to enjoy her food while she still could.

“Nothing,” he says, even though it very clearly _wasn’t_ ‘nothing’. (She should have just told the waiter she was a client, that the man was her husband. She could have cried and maybe even gotten her cake for free out of pity but, instead, she had said what she said and maybe that was why he was so amused.) Before she can say anything about it, Peter hesitates, his fork hovering over his plate and appears to see something just past her head, frowns, shoulders tensing like he’s getting ready to run. She follows his eyes, watches as the woman and her date were getting ready to leave, the check waiting to be picked up by their waiter, a few bills peeking out of the top of the book the receipt came housed in.

Peter starts shoveling the rest of his food into his mouth like an animal.

“Hey,” Mindy says, gets his attention, makes a gesture with her hand like she wants him to give her something and he glances at her quizzically, still chewing and takes a couple seconds to figure out what she’s trying to say but then pulls out his wallet, slaps a few dollars in her palm. He starts to lift himself from his chair but freezes, sits back down, does it a few more times in a strange sort of dance and then, finally, rises to his feet.

“Thanks for the cheesecake…” He says even though she hadn’t gotten it for him and he trails off as if he’s fishing for a name. For a moment, Mindy is content to not tell him but finds herself changing her mind.

He winks at her as he leaves and she shakes her head at him in return.

The waiter approaches her awkwardly a few minutes later, hands her the check without asking if she wanted it as if he was in the hurry to push her out the door (which:  _rude_ ) and, when she inspects the receipt, she finds that they charged her for his cheesecake anyway.

 

— — — —

 

It’s nearing eight in the evening and she’s on her couch, the television on, remote in hand as she flips around, over and over, bewildered at how there didn’t seem to be anything worthwhile to watch because there was _always_ something worth watching, especially on a Friday, when she’s distracted by a knock at her door. She lowers the volume, waits, turns her ear towards where the sound had come from to make sure she had actually heard what she heard and it wasn’t her neighbor moving his furniture around again or the man upstairs getting ready to start practicing his swing dancing (she only knows that’s what he’s doing because he’d asked in the lobby one afternoon if she’d be interested in joining him which, honestly, even if she _had_ known him better was not something she’d _ever_ want to do) or, possibly, the couple down the hall arguing, throwing things, but then there it was again: _knock, knock_.

She considers ignoring it; it wouldn’t be the first time a solicitor had managed to worm their way into the building to try and sell something or preach at her and opening the door for a stranger is how beautiful women got themselves killed and on the eleven o'clock news.

 _Knock, knock_.

She looks through the peephole, takes a step back, looks again.

Peter smiles at her when she opens the door and she really wishes he would stop doing that.

“How did you find me?” She asks, doesn’t let him answer. “Are you obsessed with me now? I admit, I am a little flattered,” she says, “And I don’t—”

“It’s my job,” he says, interrupting her and she furrows her brow. “How I found you. And you have my photo. Of the…” He makes a lewd gesture and she scoffs at him, reaches her hand out to stop him from doing it because it was clear he _wouldn’t_ unless she intervened. “I don’t really care why you wanted it, none of my business, but it’s kind of the moneymaker for this case so if you…” He moves as if he’s just going to walk into her apartment and look for it himself but Mindy pushes her palm flat against his chest, keeps him out in the hallway.

She finds her purse where she left it on the kitchen counter and there, pushed towards the bottom, jumbled among everything else she had packed in there, was the photograph of the woman and the man from the restaurant, a crease down the middle from where it had been folded together with all the others, split right between them as if it’s a wall separating the two bodies from one another. She hands it over and, for a fleeting second, they’re both touching it, holding it between them but she lets go, waits for him to thank her or maybe just leave but he doesn’t move.

“What?” She asks, flashes back to when she’d asked the same thing at lunch after she’d lied to the waiter about them working together and, suddenly, she feels self-conscious. Mindy expects him to say _nothing_ , just like before but instead he says:

“I’m about to go watch them have dinner. You want to come with me?” She crosses her arms, stares at him, scrutinizes his face, trying to sort out if he’s just pulling her leg or if he’s planning on taking her to a dark alley somewhere to do something awful or, maybe, he’s being completely serious. “You’re already telling people we work together.”

“Okay, I told _one_ person and I said that so he’d leave us alone and not _ban me_ from there for being a degenerate because of your gross photos. Besides,” she says, and she hadn’t realized how much she gestured when she spoke until she noticed him watching her hands, “Watching other people eat does not sound like my idea of a good time.”

“You’re right,” Peter says, “It blows. But a guy sitting at the bar watching a couple eat their dinner is far less creepy if he’s not doing it alone.”

“Are you really going to spy on them or are you asking me on a date?” Mindy asks.

“Column A, Column B,” Peter says. Mindy narrows her eyes at him, puts her hand on the door and starts to close it, doesn’t miss the disappointment that flashes across his face and she speaks to him through the crack before she shuts it completely.

“I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”

 

— — — —

 

Peter explains to her that the bartender of the place that he takes her to—the place that the man and woman were supposedly dining—owed him a favor and that they could sit at the bar for as long as they needed, nobody would bother them and the first two drinks would be free but, after that, they’d have to pay. ( _He_ would have to pay, he clarifies. _But please stop me if I try to have more than four_ , he says as he leads her through the front doors, the low hum of music and the ambient noise of people enjoying their evening hitting her as they walk inside. _I really need to remember everything I see tonight_.)

There, indeed, just past the hostess’ podium, is the couple from that afternoon sitting together, a candle on the table, glasses of wine in front of them and not a plate in sight. Either they had only just gotten here or they were between courses. Peter doesn’t ask what Mindy wants, which is sort of strike one against him but the drink turns out to be good and then he tells her to pretend to laugh at something he said, tells her to try it without sounding like she’s auditioning poorly for the role of an old Southern woman, which was strike two but then he says something genuinely funny and she actually laughs.

They talk but she doesn’t remember much of what either of them say. They keep their gaze focused mostly on the couple and Peter writes notes down on the back of his napkin, stained with the ring of condensation from his beer. She tells the bartender to switch out his drink with seltzer while he’s in the bathroom and he doesn’t complain when he comes back. She keeps waiting for strike three to happen but it never does, unless she counted having to watch the man and woman sharing an enormous brownie, a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream cascading over it (which she almost does).

They leave before the couple does because Peter says that he’s got what he needed, he has enough, asks how many drinks she had and then pays for the third one that he had ordered.

“That wasn't so bad,” Mindy says once they’re outside and Peter seems like he’s going to say something in response but then someone clears their throat behind them and they turn simultaneously, barely have time to react before a fist hits Peter hard across the head. It’s the man he’s been following, the woman lurking behind him, fur coat wrapped around her shoulders and the man looks pissed, his face red, a vein popping on his forehead. Mindy puts a hand to her mouth, says _oh my god_ , and then puts her fingers on Peter’s elbow, helps him stand up, straighten his back.

The man hadn’t hit him especially hard but there’s a cut on Peter’s forehead, just above his eyebrow that must have come from the ring the man was wearing on the hand he threw the punch with. He tells Peter that his girl ( _his girl_ —like it's the forties, says it like someone who’s too old to be going out with the girl he’s referring to) had noticed Peter watching her all night, turns to Mindy and asks her if she knew her boyfriend was gawking at other women while he was out with her.

Mindy thinks about appealing to the woman, to see if she could get him to back off but there’s a look on her face as if this is exactly what she asked for, what she wanted to happen, so she returns her attention back to the man still hovering over them.

“He’s got a problem,” she says, “I know. It’s disgusting. But what can I do? I love him. He’s sorry.” She glances at Peter, who’s wiping blood from his eye. “You’re sorry.” Not a question.

“Sure,” Peter says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your girlfriend—” The man hits him again, doesn’t let him finish as if he already has an idea how Peter planned on completing that sentence and, when Peter gets back up, he seems like he’s going to turn the one-sided fight into two-sided but Mindy grabs his arm, starts tugging on him and he goes with her, the two of them walking briskly away, moving down the sidewalk until they couldn’t see the couple anymore.

 

— — — —

 

“Does that sort of thing happen to you a lot?” Mindy asks as they stand outside the convenience store where she had gone in to buy aspirin, a bottle of water, bandaids and gauze, the latter which she was currently using to clean up his face, Peter holding on to the boxes so she could have both hands free.

“No,” Peter says. “I’m usually better than that. But luck and I aren’t exactly best bros sometimes. And I was distracted.”

“Distracted,” Mindy repeats absent-mindedly, gives him her garbage, starts digging in the box for a bandage small enough for his cut, eventually finds one, rips the paper and pushes the adhesive against his skin. “You shouldn’t have antagonized him.”

“I didn’t.”

“‘I’m sorry your girlfriend is—’,” She reminds him, reiterates the beginning of whatever he was going to say. “Is a what? What were you going to say?”

“I don’t know.” She gives him a look. “I don’t!” Mindy checks the rest of his face, his jaw, his nose and her arm is covering his face so she doesn’t see the way that he’s looking at her until she moves it.

“What?” (That’s the third time she’s asked and, this time, she almost finds herself wishing he'd say  _nothing_ in reply.)

“You said you loved me.”

“I also called you disgusting,” Mindy says. “Don’t let it go to your head.” She takes the boxes of gauze and bandages from him so he can open the pill bottle on his own, gives him the water she had tucked into her purse. He swallows four at once, stares at her, searching her face. “Wh—” She starts to ask but is cut off when the bottles go clattering to the sidewalk when he drops them to take her face in his hands and kiss her.

“Oh,” she says, lets the word escape on an exhale when he pulls away.

“What’re you doing tomorrow?” He asks, still has his hands on her face and she blinks at him.

“Tomorrow? Why?”

“I have to talk to that woman’s husband, give him what I found and then I’m tracking down a guy for the man who gave him up for adoption thirty years ago.” It sounds, at first, as if he’s just telling her about his day, about his upcoming plans to see what she thinks but then she replays his question and realizes:  _he wants me to come with him._

“I already have a job,” Mindy says.

“Want a new one?” She blinks at him which really wasn’t much of an answer, it could mean anything, but she’s made enough impulsive decisions for one day involving Peter. She laughs. It's obviously not what he wanted, he was  _serious_ and her noise dies down.

She barely knew him but she didn't need to know him well to be able to tell that he was a mess. He wrote important things on the backs of napkins, he put creases in crucial evidence for his cases and he implied that he drank too much sometimes, maybe more than sometimes. She wasn't going to misrepresent herself, claim that she wasn't a mess, too, in her own special sort of way. Maybe, somehow, the universe finally found someone who's messiness congealed cleanly with her with her own. He wasn't asking her to move across the country with him. He was just asking:  _need a change?_

Maybe she did. But that was  _one day_ sort of thing, not a  _tomorrow_ thing. Right now, she just needed adventure. She needed a thrill. Peter could be good for that. (He already had been.)

She says as much in her own weird sort of way, fumbles over her words, rambles, a flurry of hands making a point and then waits for him to walk away, thinking:  _your crazy found my crazy but one of us may be too much for the other_. But then it's his turn to laugh.

"Okay," he says. "I can work with that." Which, really, considering who she was talking to, what she already knew about him, was the best answer she could have hoped for.

**Author's Note:**

> title (sort of) from "citizen of glass" by agnes obel.
> 
> I'm on tumblr [@anthonycrowley](http://anthonycrowley.tumblr.com/).


End file.
